the groundhog day project

I've already pointed out how the musical offers "the greatest illusion of spontaneity and effortlessness" (Feuer, 1995, p. 447). Additionally, it offers timelessness, even in the midst of its story. The stage version of Hedwig , I've heard, is set during a single show, with the asides and flashbacks (and I hope animations) drawing on that. This film version offers several different shows and a linear plotline that covers probably less than half the film, with the flashbacks and asides and animations adding to that plotline even as they pull away from it. Flashbacks as memory--they don't exist in the past, they exist in the present. (I remember in my Media Theory class last quarter, we were talking about Groundhog Day , which happened a few times, and whether or not it was "Classical Hollywood Cinema." The professor had a problem with the nonlinear structure, but I argued that the film is actually quite linear. Phil's story is linear. It's just ...

For the record, I would have rather had more research and depth for yesterday 's entry. Given the short time frame I've got to research stuff for this blog, I just couldn't find a good source about queer coding in cinema. Found a few sources talking about how certain characters in, say, 1950s' films can be understood as gay even though their films could not really have them be, given the Hays Code. But, they just didn't get into details about what aspects of a character demonstrated coded homosexuality. Unfortunately, the topic proved more complicated than I had hoped. But, life--and this blog--goes on. The starting point today is a bit from Ebert's (1981) review of the film. He tells us that "the film doesn't like women [and so] its sex scenes all create fear and hostility." I got into this a bit the last two days , and I must at once both agree and disagree with Ebert's sentiment. On the one hand, I do not believe the hostility and fear t...

I was saying something about Satine's introduction, performing for the crowd of mostly men in the Moulin Rouge. I think I might skip past the rest of Lacan for now and move on to the feminist critique... Vladimir Propp (1968) lists among the basic dramatis personae the princess . Serving as the princess in Moulin Rouge! , Satine is "a sought for person" and she "cannot be exactly delineated" from her father (p. 79). As I have already said above-- If you haven't been reading this blog the last few days, you should know that much of what I've been writing about Moulin Rouge! I am deliberately repurposing for a paper for my media theory class... or vice versa. Hence, this "above" which actually refers to something I said yesterday or the day before, or maybe both. Just bear with me. --Zidler is just one male figure in this film standing in for the patriarchal order over Satine and her body. Quite specifically, he serves as her father, ...

Freud will have to continue a little bit for a couple reasons: 1) there is bit more to say about Freud before I inject some Lacan and 2) I realized that Mulvey doesn't include Jung, so in terms of my paper not being a research paper but an analytical piece based around the supplied readings, I shall leave Jung out of it... even if there may be useful things to say; for instance, much of what Mulvey is trying to argue about how Freudian psychoanalysis connects with common cinematic representation fits with the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious . Effectively, however much a filmmaker intends to put psychoanalytic concepts into a film, they go in anyway. And, even divergent concepts, arguably, exist within film not necessarily because a filmmaker may deliberately be trying to diverge from the norm but unconsciously. But anyway, Freud... Another Freudian idea central to our experience of film, according to Mulvey, is scopophilia , looking as a source of pleasure. The voyeu...